


(i'm a) human being

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: (sort of...) - Freeform, Aliens, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, High School, the Roswell AU no one asked for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2019-10-29 22:18:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17816555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: Archie is earnest. He’s loyal. And now he’s convinced that he’s got some kind of unbreakable bond with Veronica because last Saturday afternoon, when a stray bullet had smashed through the window of Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe and flown straight into Archie’s heart, she had pressed her hands to the bloody, gaping wound in his chest and healed him.He knows their secret – knows why Veronica was capable of such an act in the first place. He knows that Jughead could do the same, if he wanted to.But the very worst thing about Archie Andrews isn’t any of that.It’s that his best friend is Betty Cooper.(Roswell AU.)





	1. one

Of all the people whose lives Veronica could’ve saved, _of course_ it had to be Archie Andrews.

It’s not that Jughead doesn’t like Archie Andrews. He’s probably the nicest jock at Roswell High – no, the nicest kid, period. He always holds the door open for everyone behind him – girl or boy, doesn’t matter. One time on a field trip in sixth grade, when he saw Jughead had no money for lunch, he’d claimed he wasn’t hungry and gave him his entire roast beef sandwich. A few years later, after Cheryl Blossom nominated Ethel Muggs for homecoming queen as a joke, Archie asked her to be his date and danced with her all night long.

(That last one was not something Jughead had actually witnessed. He’d been at the diner as usual, working on his novel, a bottomless cup of coffee at his elbow. No cream, no sugar, no interruptions. Just the way he liked it.)

So it’s not that Archie isn’t a good guy. It’s that he’s _too_ good of a guy. He’s earnest. He’s loyal. And now he’s convinced that he’s got some kind of unbreakable bond with Veronica because last Saturday afternoon, when a stray bullet had smashed through the window of Pop’s Chocklit Shoppe and flown straight into Archie’s heart, she had pressed her hands to the bloody, gaping wound in his chest and healed him.

He knows their secret – knows why Veronica was capable of such an act in the first place. He knows that Jughead could do the same, if he wanted to.

But the very worst thing about Archie Andrews isn’t any of that.

It’s that his best friend is Betty Cooper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jughead doesn’t notice anything weird about Betty Cooper until three days after the Incident, as he’s come to call it, when he catches her staring at him in English class.

He stares back. Their eyes remain locked for a little longer than he expects, but eventually she backs down, turning away to face the whiteboard.

He grabs Veronica by the arm as she’s on her way to lunch that day and drags her into an empty stairwell. “He told Betty,” he hisses, crossing his arms over his chest.

Veronica mirrors his position, instantly on the defensive. “He promised me he wouldn’t tell anyone –”

“He told Betty.” Jughead shakes his head. “I saw her staring at me in class this morning.”

“She probably just can’t resist your rakish charm,” Veronica says, rolling her eyes. “Oh, wait. You don’t have any.”

“I’m glad you find this so amusing. When they’re cutting my chest open with a scalpel down in some secret government laboratory, I’ll think, well, at least Veronica had a good time.”

She says something in return, but he doesn’t hear it, already halfway up the stairs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you ask Jughead, Betty Cooper is pretty much the female version of Archie Andrews.

She’s kind, she’s pretty, she’s well-liked. She’s not really as “cool” as Archie – though it’s something she could probably easily achieve if she wanted to, by joining the cheerleading squad, or just swapping out some of her Peter Pan-collared sweaters for something a little less buttoned-up – but she’s friends with practically everyone.

And while her best friend is the budding star of every athletic program the school offers, Betty has her hands in everything else: serving as treasurer of the student council, sitting on the dance committee, editing the school paper. Lately Jughead’s even seen her picking up waitressing shifts at Pop’s on the weekends, presumably because having more than five minutes to just sit around and do nothing would make her petite blonde head explode.

None of that is what makes Betty Cooper dangerous, though. It’s this: she’s _smart._ And persistent. Not just in the classic overachiever sort of way. When the school board tried to end the music program as a cost-cutting measure, Betty led the campaign to save it. (She won.) When the school mascot – an enormous green alien named Alvin – went missing last year, Betty figured out the culprits before the cops could.

When Betty Cooper is determined to get to the bottom of something…she does.

And now he’s afraid the thing in her crosshairs is him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which is why, when he answers the knock on the trailer door the following Saturday, he is not surprised to see that it’s her.

(Well, okay – he’s a little surprised, because normally a girl like Betty wouldn’t step foot in a place like the Crashdown Trailer Park. But again: she’s persistent.)

“No thanks, I don’t want any Girl Scout cookies.” Jughead tries to close the door, but she’s already got one foot through it.

“I just want to talk to you.” Her eyes are wide and honest, and so green in the mid-morning sunlight that they’re actually sort of mesmerizing. He relents, grateful that FP’s already out for the day.

“Can’t imagine why,” Jughead mutters, stepping aside to let her in.

His cheeks burn as she looks around the tiny living room of the trailer where he lives with his foster dad. There’s an empty beer bottle on the floor, and the coffee stain on the sofa might give a person with an active imagination the impression that someone was once murdered there. But altogether it’s tidy; Jughead does his best to keep it that way, just in case social services shows up for a check-in.

Betty stands there looking around, hands clasped together, for so long that he leans against the doorframe and says, “We can go into my room if you want.”

“No, that’s okay,” she says quickly, smoothing her hands over her skirt as she perches on the edge of FP’s beat-up recliner. She’s dressed in her Pop’s uniform – a blue, retro-style dress with a silver collar and sleeves. He can see the glittery Styrofoam balls on the end of her antenna headband sticking out of her purse. She must be on her way to a shift.

Jughead sits across from her on the sofa, throws one foot up on the coffee table, and waits.

And waits, and waits. “I thought you wanted to talk,” he says.

“I do.” Betty clears her throat. “I’m just not sure how to say this.”

For the first time since their staring contest at school, his chest twinges with sympathy. If she does, in fact, know what he thinks she knows – and if she believes it to be true – then coming here to confront him about it probably took a lot of courage. For all she knows, he could unhinge his jaw and bite her head clean off before she even gets a chance to lunge for the door.

(He can’t; for all that he and Veronica have experimented with changing the molecular structure of stationary objects, they can’t change the structure of a living thing, themselves included. Which is probably for the best.)

“I know you’re a…you and Veronica are…” Betty trails off.

“Unlikely friends?” he supplies. “Roswell’s best and brightest?”

“Aliens,” she says firmly.

Hearing her say it out loud makes him feel like he’s in a dream – no, a nightmare. He and Veronica barely use the word themselves, lest someone overhear and report them to the FBI. (Or Border Patrol. These days it’s a crapshoot.)

Jughead does his best not to react, just in case there’s the slim possibility that he can convince her it’s all a big prank that he, Veronica, and Archie have decided to play on her for some reason.

“I know that Archie was shot, and Veronica healed him. I saw the handprint she left on his chest.”

So, okay – maybe not something he can pass off as a prank, after all. There _might_ be some way to explain a glowing, rainbow-colored handprint that doesn’t involve magical alien healing powers, but if there is, Jughead missed school the day they covered it in chem.

“I thought he was crazy. And even if he wasn’t, I didn’t see what you had to do with it. But then I remembered.” Betty reaches into her purse, pulling out a folded-up sheet of newsprint. She unfolds it carefully, and holds it out for Jughead to read. It trembles slightly in her hands.

He pulls his foot off of the coffee table, leans forward, and takes it.

 _Abandoned Children Found Wandering Route 285_ , the headline reads. There’s no photo to accompany it, and only a few paragraphs of text below. But Jughead doesn’t need anyone to tell him the story.

He lived it.

“You were found together,” Betty says, and he knows she’s repeating the facts more for her own sake than for his. “I remember hearing my parents talk about it when it happened. But I never connected the dots. I never knew it was the two of you.”

And why should she? A couple of cops had found them that night: buck naked, gripping one another’s hands, stumbling along the side of the highway, bare feet leaving spots of blood on the gravel. Veronica – already so cute, so charming without even speaking a word of English – had been adopted a few days later by Hiram and Hermione Lodge, a wealthy pair of developers who’d had trouble conceiving a child of their own.

But they’d only wanted one. Their busy careers, they’d explained to Veronica years later, meant they just couldn’t be adequate parents to _two_ small children with what appeared at the time to be significant cognitive disabilities. And so Jughead – grubby, withdrawn, taciturn Jughead – had entered the foster system.

He still doesn’t know what had possessed FP Jones, a drunk, thirty-something divorcé who made his living working construction, to apply to become a foster parent. Nor does he know why social services said yes. But he had, and they did, and though FP was an unreliable alcoholic who couldn’t keep down a steady job, he managed to keep Jughead clothed and sheltered and (mostly) fed. So here Jughead is, twelve years later, still living in the only cramped two-bedroom in the entire trailer park that sits just over the line between Roswell’s north and south sides.

“We didn’t even make the front page.” He hands the newsprint back to her. “I’m kind of offended.”

Betty folds up the paper again, but keeps it in her lap. “So it’s all true? It’s…that was you?”

There’s no use in lying to her. She is Betty Cooper, after all, and would probably go digging up old police records if he told her no, he was just your run-of-the-mill foster kid born to human parents who didn’t want him.

Jughead shrugs. “Depends on what you’ve heard. But yeah, that was me.” His tone is casual, but beneath it his heart’s pounding, palms sweating.

This girl – this girl and her tight, corkscrew ponytail, her clean white Keds, her dumb jock boy-next-door-best-friend – holds his life in her hands. He barely even knows her. He _definitely_ doesn’t trust her.

But Veronica, as usual, has left him with no other choice.

Jughead swallows. “Where’d you find that, anyway?”

“In the Register archives.” She says it like it’s obvious, and in fairness, it is. Her mom and dad own the Roswell Register, the one and only newspaper covering local news in New Mexico’s fifth-largest city (though more and more the daily edition consists mostly of articles reprinted from the Associated Press).

“Right.” He hadn’t even considered the fact that her parents are both journalists, and probably responsible for Betty’s inclination to stick her nose into every single situation that catches her attention. Inside, he gives a deep sigh; he’s even more fucked than he thought.

The realization makes him defensive again. “Well, now you know. I’m an alien. Mission accomplished, you can run off and tell your parents to publish it in their newspaper. Of course, no one will believe it, other than the FBI agents who show up in the middle of the night to kidnap me and Veronica so they can experiment on us like lab rats.”

Betty looks stricken, and for a moment he feels guilty. But the moment passes – after all, Betty’s not the one who hatched out of a human-sized pod in a cave and then spent every minute of the next twelve years fearing the day when the wrong person will figure it out.

All he can do now is hope _she’s_ not the wrong person.

“I would never do that.” Betty’s voice wavers with what he thinks is anger. She puts the article back in her purse. “I’m here to tell you to tell Veronica to stay away from Archie.”

It’s the first truly surprising thing she’s said since showing up at his door – so surprising that at first he thinks he’s misheard. “What?”

“He’s acting completely crazy. He thinks he’s in _love_ with her.”

Ah – he should’ve guessed. Betty’s jealous. Somehow, the thought irritates him even more.

“It’ll wear off in a few days, when the handprint does,” he says dismissively. “It opens up this emotional…you know what, nevermind. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a side effect. You’ll have your boyfriend back to normal before homeroom on Monday.”

Betty’s eyes flash. “He’s not my boyfriend. And the handprint’s already gone, Jughead.”

That, he has to admit, is strange. “He’ll get over it, okay? He just wants to get his dick wet, and he thinks he owes Veronica his life.”

“That’s not the point!”

Jughead sighs. “What _is_ the point?”

“The point is that this is _dangerous_. Veronica’s an _alien_.”

He doesn’t disagree, though he suspects he and Betty have come to the same conclusion from very different angles. “She saved his life, she’s not going to hurt him.”

“Maybe not on purpose, but – who knows what could happen! Have either of you ever had sex with a human?”

His face heats up at the question, and hers does, too. She barrels on before he can answer. “And even aside from that – you said it yourself, there are probably FBI agents out there hunting down your very existence. Archie can’t get caught up in that.”

Again, he doesn’t disagree, which is why he’s furious with Veronica for setting off this entire chain of events in the first place. But still: it’s _her_ mess to clean up. “Why is this _my_ responsibility, exactly?”

Betty squares her chin, looking him in the eye. “Because Veronica listens to you.”

Jughead snorts. “If that were true, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He can see the moment that it dawns on her what he means.

That if Veronica had listened to Jughead, Betty might be sitting at her best friend’s funeral right now instead.

Something shifts in the air between them, almost like it’s curdling.

“Just…say something. She’ll listen to you before Archie listens to me.” Betty stands up, looping her arm through her purse, and reaches the door in three steps.

“Hey Betty,” he says just as she steps to the ground. She turns back to look at him where he stands in the doorway, squinting against the sunlight.

Jughead looks back at her for a moment, and then nods. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

He regrets his parting words to Betty as soon as he says them, and then even more when Veronica shows up at his door around dinnertime, a bag of Pop’s takeout in her hands.

“You told Betty you’re going to _kill her_?” she demands through clenched teeth, shoving the bag against his chest.

“I – well, yeah,” he admits.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Veronica doesn’t wait for an answer. “You are such an idiot. It’s like the _one_ thing you could’ve said to make her go running to Sheriff Keller.”

His heart stops. “She went to Keller?”

“ _No_ , she didn’t, no thanks to you.” Veronica grabs the bag out of his hands and shoves her hand inside, grabbing a handful of fries before dropping the rest onto the kitchen table. “You’re lucky I paid for this before Archie told me what happened.”

Jughead unwraps his burger eagerly, still hungry despite the figurative rollercoaster ride his stomach endured over the past thirty seconds. He’s always wondered if his voracious appetite was an alien thing, though Veronica’s always insisted that it’s not, because _she_ has a stomach the size of a normal person, thank you very much.

He allows himself to swallow a mouthful of food before asking, “What’d he say happened?”

“That Betty came by to say hello, and ask you some questions, and _you_ responded by threatening her life.”

It does more or less describe the morning’s sequence of events, though Archie’s rendition omits some key details. “She wants me to keep you away from Archie. Apparently he’s in love with you, and she’s afraid you’re going to give him alien herpes, or something.”

Veronica’s eyes go soft – not the reaction he’d expected after telling her she’s basically been accused of spreading otherworldly STDs. “He’s in love with me?”

“He _thinks_ he’s in love with you. And that is not the point.” Jughead pops the lid off of the milkshake she’d brought him, and drips some Tabasco sauce into the cup, stirring it around with his straw before taking a sip. Sweet and spicy: the perfect combination, at least to his and Veronica’s tongues. “She thinks it’s dangerous for you to spend time together, and that’s the one thing me and her actually agree on.”

Veronica scoffs. “Dangerous? Archie’s the nicest guy at school.”

“It’s been one week, and he’s already told Betty about us.” Jughead puts what’s left of his burger down, so she knows he’s being serious. “What’s to stop him from telling his dad next? Or his football buddies? Or the next random person who smiles at him on the street?”

“Jughead.” She’s using the voice that tells him she’s serious, too. “Archie _knows_ how important this secret is. Betty is his best friend, he – he had to tell someone. Imagine if you found out something like this. You’d want to tell me, wouldn’t you, so you had someone to talk to about it?”

The truth is, he’d be perfectly content to work out his emotions the way he always does: by pouring them into the words of his novel. But he knows telling Veronica that would only hurt her feelings.

“Archie trusts Betty,” she continues. “And I trust Archie.”

Jughead taps his fingertips against the tabletop, sensing he’s already lost this argument – for now, at least. “Betty doesn’t trust you. Or me.”

Veronica reaches across the table, pressing her hand over his restless fingers until they fall still. “Then I guess we’ll have to convince her.”


	2. two

One might assume that daily life would enter a tailspin after the discovery of something as earth-shattering as the existence of aliens. But a month on, Betty realizes, it’s almost like nothing has even happened.

Sheriff Keller had (absurdly) bought the excuse that the dried bloodstains all over Archie’s shirt were actually the remains of a broken bottle of ketchup, assuaging any fears that law enforcement might question how a high schooler had survived a bullet to the chest without medical intervention.

And so, free from the suspicion and spotlight they’d feared, Archie and Veronica were together. They had yet to officially announce themselves as a couple, though no one at school really cared. He was a football player, and she was rich and hot, and seeing as Archie had pretty much already dated his way through the entire cheerleading squad _and_ color guard, it made sense that he’d move on to a real estate heiress next.

It had driven Betty crazy at first that her plan had failed. (Not that _tell-Jughead-to-tell-Veronica-to-not-date-Archie_ was ever much of a plan. At best, it was a scheme; at worst, a foible.)

But she certainly _feels_ like she’s failed in trying to find some resolution to the whole “aliens are real, and they sit next to me in homeroom” situation. There’s no clear path forward, no _goal_ , other than all of them still being alive at the end of another day.

In that sense, at least, her efforts haven’t been a complete disaster. Because Archie is still living, and breathing, and maddeningly insistent that he’s found the love of his life in the form of one slim, pretty girl from another planet.

“It just…it feels _right_ , Betty. I can’t explain it.” On the other side of the booth, Archie’s eyes have taken on a dreamy, clouded quality. “I don’t even care that she’s an alien –”

Betty kicks him hard under the table. It’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, and only a few customers remain in the diner, most of whom she knows to be locals. But the handful of strangers…

The words Jughead had snarled at her in his trailer echo through her head: _they’ll experiment on us like lab rats._

“Don’t say that.” She leans forward over the table, lowering her voice. “We need a code word we can use for them. Like…”

“Czechoslovakians?”

Betty blinks. “What?”

“The code word. We could say Czechoslovakians.” Archie munches on an onion ring, sounding pleased with himself. “It’s this country in Russia or something where my mom’s family is from. So it won’t be weird if we’re talking about it.”

Betty presses her fingertips to her temple. “Arch, that hasn’t been a country since before we were born.”

His face pales. “Why? What happened to them?”

“Nothing, they – it doesn’t matter. That’s fine. If you can remember to say that, it’s fine.”

“You should give Veronica a chance,” Archie says. “I think you’d like her if you got to know her.”

“Like _you’ve_ got to know her?” Betty mutters, stealing an onion ring off of his plate. “A couple weeks ago you’d barely even spoken to her.” 

He shakes his head. “You can’t understand unless you’ve felt it.”

Felt what, exactly, he never says. She chews slowly, narrowing her eyes at Archie as he sips from his chocolate milkshake. She’s pretty sure he and Veronica haven’t progressed past second base yet, if only because she hasn’t seen the tell-tale curtain drawn across his bedroom window that usually accompanies that step forward in Archie’s relationships. Then again, maybe they’ve been spending time at Veronica’s place instead of his.

“I’m worried about you,” she admits.

“I know.” Archie’s hand finds hers across the table. “But you don’t have to be.”

So she tries. She’s still Betty Cooper – straight-A student, editor of the Blue and Gold, class treasurer – and he’s still Archie, her best friend since the sandbox days. They still walk to school together in the morning, and eat lunch together during fourth period, and play video games on the weekend.

Things are so mundane, so _normal_ , that she probably could have forgotten aliens existed altogether if not for one thing:

Jughead.

“He’s staring at you again,” Kevin Keller tells her one evening during her shift at Pop’s, his lips curled into a smug smile.

Betty frowns and takes his plate, though at least a third of his burger hasn’t been eaten yet. “Is not.”

“Is so. Give that back, I’m not done with it.”

She ignores him. “He probably just wants more coffee.”

She doesn’t know why she bothers arguing with Kevin. His assumption – that Jughead Jones has a crush on her – is far more benign than the truth, which is that it’s an intimidation tactic.

At school, at the diner, even one time at the drive-in when they’d been forced to share the back of Fred Andrews’ pickup with their canoodling best friends. Wherever they are, Jughead keeps his eyes on Betty, so that she knows he’s always watching, always waiting, always ready to snap her neck with a flick of his wrist.

(She has no idea if he can do that. All she knows is that Veronica healed Archie, which means Jughead can probably do the same; and if they can both heal, logic would dictate that they’re both also capable of causing harm.)

It’s honestly insulting. Is she worried about what it means for her best friend to get intimately involved with a girl of another species? Of course. Does she have an endless list of relevant questions about said girl’s medical history and physiology? Absolutely. She’s Betty Cooper. That’s who she is.

But none of it means that she wishes them dead. They’re not invaders. They’re not a _threat._ According to Veronica, they don’t even know what they are, or where they came from, or why they’re here.

All of which are _very good reasons_ to proceed with extreme caution when it comes to human-alien relationships, if you ask Betty – and, she’s pretty sure, if you ask Jughead. They could be allies in this quest to save Archie and Veronica from themselves; it’s why she’d gone to him in the first place.

But they haven’t really spoken since that day in the trailer park, aside from the rushed semi-apology he’d muttered at her a few days later in the hallway at school. She’d assumed at the time that Veronica had put him up to it, an assumption pretty much confirmed by the fact that every attempt she makes to broach the subject – or any subject – with him is quickly rebuffed.

Like now.

“More coffee?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer before topping off his cup.

“Thanks.”

Jughead begins to type on his laptop keyboard, a clear dismissal, but something stops her from walking away. “Are you working on the English assignment?”

“No.” He continues typing for a few moments before glancing up at her. “It’s a personal project.”

His answer piques her curiosity. She’s always dreamed of writing professionally someday – as the child of journalists, it comes with the territory – but she’s never known any of her peers to share her interest. Betty leans forward, angling for a glimpse of his screen. “Like creative writing?”

He snaps the laptop shut. “Like none of your business.”

Betty rolls her eyes, grabs the half-full basket of french fries off of his table, and walks away.

So much for that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprisingly, it’s Veronica who tries hardest to quell Betty’s fears.

“Your sneakers are really cute,” she tells Betty after gym class on Friday, settling onto the locker room bench where Betty is lacing up her shoes. “And so white.”

“Thanks.” Betty looks up and feels her pulse jump when she realizes how close the other girl – the _Czechoslovakian_ – is.

Before Veronica Lodge saved her best friend’s life, Betty had never quite known what to make of her. Veronica was wealthy, pretty, good at dancing, decent at academics. She wasn’t particularly friendly, nor was she entirely aloof; she occupied some middle ground which left her neither an object of envy nor disdain. It was hard to look away from her shiny dark hair and gleaming pearls when she was right in front of you, but as soon as you did, you kind of forgot she existed.

All of which Betty now recognizes as a carefully calibrated balancing act, designed to cloak Veronica as someone who blended into the background, though not so much as to suggest she was hiding something. If someone had put a gun to Betty’s head two months ago and asked her which of her classmates was an alien from outer space, Veronica Lodge was probably the last name that would’ve come to mind.

“Archie told me about Czechoslovakia. It’s very clever.” Veronica smiles.

Betty says nothing at first, waiting for a _but_ that never comes.

Veronica forges on. “I’ve been thinking we should hang out sometime. We have that test coming up for AP Bio next week – maybe we could be study buddies?”

And so Betty finds herself in the elevator of the Pembrooke the very next afternoon, hands gripping the straps of her backpack a little too tightly, the button labeled _Penthouse_ lit up in green.  

The doors slide open to reveal her hostess already waiting in the foyer. “Betty!” Veronica pulls her in for what Betty thinks must be the only air kiss to ever take place in Roswell, New Mexico. “I’m so happy you’re here. Let me show you to my room, and I’ll grab us some snacks.”

Veronica deposits her in front of a door mounted with a gold nameplate, then flounces off to the kitchen. Betty pushes it open, half-expecting to find a corner office inside, and not a teenage girl’s bedroom.

What she discovers instead is perhaps even more unexpected: Jughead, sprawled out on Veronica’s velvety purple bedspread, surrounded by stray sheets of paper and an open biology textbook.

“Oh.” Betty stops short in the doorway.

Jughead looks up from his notes, his lips pressing into a thin line as he takes her in. He sits up on the bed, and as he does a few pages slide off the edge and flutter to the ground. Betty steps forward to help pick them up, her gaze catching on a drawing in the margins.

It’s clearly something that Jughead had doodled into his notebook in a moment of boredom, but it snags in her brain. She’s seen it before, though she doesn’t know where: a spiral with a triangle in the middle.

Jughead reaches to take the paper from her, but Betty jerks it away. “What is this?”

He looks at her like she’s slow. “My bio notes.”

“No, the – this thing.” She points to the spiral shape.

“I don’t know.” He leans forward and grabs the paper from her, slipping it back amidst the others piled beside him on the bed. “I just draw stuff sometimes.”

Before Betty can press him any further, Veronica returns with a tray bearing vegetables and dip, a package of butter cookies, and – oddly – a bottle of Tabasco sauce. Jughead goes straight for the cookies, and Betty watches in barely-concealed horror as he slathers one in hot sauce before popping it into his mouth.

“We like really sweet things mixed with really spicy,” Veronica explains, dabbing a carrot into the vegetable dip. “Help yourself.”

“That’s okay, thank you. I’m not hungry.” Betty can’t help but wrinkle her nose as Jughead shoves another Tabasco-covered cookie into his mouth. He rolls his eyes.

“It’s not poisoned,” he mumbles, mouth still full of cookie.

“I never said it was.”

He swallows. “Your face said it all for you.”

“You don’t know what my face thinks,” she mutters.

Veronica watches them, eyes narrowed in some shrewd expression. “Interesting.”

“What?” Jughead levels her with the kind of death glare that Betty imagines could easily be accompanied by actual laser beams shooting out of his eyes, if that’s a thing Czechoslovakians can do.

“You don’t want to know.” Veronica settles onto the plush loveseat that sits facing the bed, and pats the cushion beside her. “Let’s study.”

Midway through their review of genotypes, a thought occurs to Betty. “Does this stuff even apply to you guys?” she wonders aloud, then immediately claps her hand over her mouth. “God, I’m sorry. That was rude.”

“You’re fine,” Veronica assures her, but she shares a look with Jughead that Betty can’t quite decipher. “As nice as Roswell High is,” she continues, “I don’t think the kind of medical equipment we’d need to read our own genome is available on a public high school budget.”

“Right.” Feeling her face heat up, Betty buries her nose in her textbook.

“That’s why I’m working so hard to get into the biology program at MIT,” Jughead adds.

Betty glances up at him. “Really?”

“No.”

She knows that she probably deserves it. She knows that this is just how Jughead exists in the world; he’s sarcastic, and she shouldn’t take it personally. But some small, brittle thing in her chest snaps in response to his retort, and the heat in her cheeks rises up to prickle at the backs of her eyes.

She flips her textbook shut. “I forgot I have a shift tonight.”

Jughead sighs heavily from where he’s splayed out on the bed. “Betty –”

“Thank you for the snacks, Veronica.” Betty musters up a smile before bolting out the door.

Veronica catches her in the foyer before the elevator has arrived. “I would love it if you stayed. I’m really sorry about Jughead, he’s just…this has literally never happened before.” She clasps Betty’s hand, eyes pleading. “We’ve never told anyone the truth about us. Ever. And he’s terrified, because he can only see the ways that this could be a bad thing. He doesn’t see all the ways it could be an _amazing_ thing.” She squeezes Betty’s hand for emphasis.

“It’s okay. Your secret is safe with me.” Betty squeezes back lightly before letting go. “But we don’t all have to be best friends.”

Veronica’s protests are cut off by the ding of the elevator, its doors sliding silently open. “Thanks, Veronica,” Betty says, stepping back with a final wave goodbye.

On the way down, she decides that this is it. She’s done with Czechoslovakians, aliens, whatever. Archie can date whomever he wants, but Betty Cooper is not along for this messy, confusing, dangerous ride.

And then she stumbles upon something she’s pretty sure even Jughead won’t be able to dismiss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a weeknight, and she’s at the Register, doing her math homework in the back office while her parents wrap up for the evening. Halfway through a problem set her pen runs out of ink, and as she scans her mother’s desk in search of a fresh one, her gaze lands on something that makes her heart skip a beat.

The rock paperweight has always been there, sitting between a soy wax candle that’s never been lit and a framed photo from Betty’s sixth grade graduation. But it’s only now that she notices the symbol etched into its face: a spiral centered around a triangle. The same symbol Jughead had doodled in the margins of his biology notes.

Untangling herself from the Situation, as she’s come to call it in her head, had been more difficult than she’d anticipated. It wasn’t like she could ask the school registrar to reassign all of her classes halfway through the year, so she still saw Veronica and Jughead every day, still felt the weight of his gaze on her back in class and in the hallway. Her walks and lunches with Archie had grown stilted and awkward, as he apparently didn’t have much to talk about anymore that didn’t revolve around his new girlfriend. She’d even had a completely crazy dream in which Jughead, dressed in a tuxedo, asked her to be his prom date while Veronica watched from the other side of the room.

All that, and now _this._ This she can’t ignore.

She’s about to pocket the paperweight when her mother appears in the doorway, buttoning up her coat. “Ready to go?”

Betty drops it back on the desk like a hot potato, and busies herself with packing up her bookbag instead. “Mom,” she says, as casually as she can, “where’d you get that rock with the weird symbol from?”

Alice looks up from her phone for only a second. “That? We found it at the old crash site years ago. We had parties there in high school.” She jerks her chin towards the door. “Come on, your father’s waiting.”

Betty’s heart begins to pound even harder. The old crash site still attracted plenty of conspiracy theorists who fueled the Roswell tourist trade, but locals knew it was little more than an unremarkable stretch of the desert where the government had once crashed a surveillance balloon, and high school kids now went to get high and have sex in their cars.

_Or was it?_

“I have to go to the bathroom first,” she fibs, and waits until her mother has wandered away to snap a photo of the rock on her phone.

She approaches Jughead by his locker the next morning, so excited she forgets for a moment that he kind of hates her.

“To what do I owe the pleasure,” he mutters, spinning the dial on his lock back and forth until it clicks open.

“I have something to show you.” Betty twists her fingers together, unable to contain the nervous energy bubbling in her bloodstream. “I think you’ll find it intriguing.”

Jughead sighs. “How many times do I have to tell you, Betty, I’m not interested in your Herbalife pyramid scheme…” He trails off when he meets her gaze. “Oh. You’re serious.”

“Meet me in the Blue and Gold after school,” she tells him, and only when he nods in affirmation does she turn away, her exhausted, adrenaline-fueled brain buzzing at the thought of what they might uncover together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jughead’s already there waiting for her when she slips into the newspaper office after the final bell.

“Well? What is it?”

“Hello, Jughead.” Betty takes her time, placing her backpack in its usual spot at her usual desk, switching on the ancient Macintosh computer she uses to lay out the school paper twice a month. It feels good to have _him_ on tenterhooks for once. “How was your day?”

His jaw clenches as he watches her for a beat. _Are we really doing this?_ , his eyes seem to say. “It was fine. How was yours?”

“Not bad. We had a pop quiz in Spanish class this morning, which I thought was kind of unfair because we only started the unit a couple of a days ago…”

Betty babbles on, not even realizing until she’s opened up the email that she sent herself at 3 am last night what it is that she’s feeling all of a sudden.

She’s _nervous._

She cuts herself off and turns back towards Jughead, whose scowl – for once – leaves no room for interpretation. “Sorry.” Pushing her chair back, she nods towards the computer. “I think, um – you should see this.”

With one final, wary glare, Jughead crouches down beside her to peer at the screen. She watches as he takes it in, a twitch in his jaw the sole sign that he knows what he’s looking at.

It’s only when his gaze flicks over to meet hers that she realizes how close they are. Something shivery and strange melts down her spine; she forces herself not to react. “There’s more?” he asks.

Betty nods, and scrolls slowly down the page. There are nearly a dozen more – a dozen more blurry, cropped photos of the symbol from Jughead’s biology notes, which Betty had spent hours gathering as she combed through page after page of old UFO conspiracy websites that hadn’t been updated since the late ‘90s.

“My mom has this old rock with your symbol on it, and she told me last night it’s from the crash site,” Betty explains. “So I started looking through all these UFO hunter message boards and stuff, and it just…it shows up everywhere.”

Jughead stands, crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s probably because some idiot saw it in some graffiti once and decided he could make a quick buck selling fake alien rocks to other idiots with money.”

“No, that’s the thing.” Betty stands up, too. “There’s _nothing_ about this symbol in any of the articles I read. I just noticed it in the background of a photo. That’s why these are all so low quality – they were really hard to spot. No one’s seemed to pick up that it’s a pattern.”

“Or they _did_ pick up on the pattern, and someone else wants to keep it a secret.”

A familiar tingling sensation tickles at the back of Betty’s neck. “That…hadn’t occurred to me,” she admits.

Jughead paces halfway across the room, his steps quick and jerky, then stops, turning back to her. “Why are you doing this?” he demands.

Betty finds herself caught off guard by the rather obvious question. She’d been so focused on investigating the _what_ and the _who_ and the _how_ that she’d never really stopped to think about the _why._

She shrugs. “I guess I can’t resist a good mystery.”

And then – most shocking of all the things Betty has seen in the last 24 hours –

Jughead laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, so, here we are with an update...EIGHT months later! i have no explanation for this, the muse for this story just hit me about a week ago and this was the result. 
> 
> for those who haven't seen the original Roswell: "Czechoslovakians" was the code word Maria made up so she and Liz could talk about the aliens. I still wanted to use it here even though it doesn't make much sense, lol
> 
> also, "a ketchup bottle broke" was also the excuse given in the original show's pilot, however _that_ show's law enforcement (sup Jim Valenti) was slightly more on top of things than Riverdale's. how lucky for our faves that Sheriff Keller is incompetent in all universes!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this update, and if so, that you'll be so kind as to leave a comment! lots of hugs!

**Author's Note:**

> \- This idea popped into my head late last night and I just couldn't _not_ write it. The original Roswell was my very first fandom so it holds a special place in my heart. (And Michael & Maria were my first OTP!)
> 
> \- I think this is going to be 3 chapters long. And I will tell you right off the bat that I have no intention of getting into any actual sci-fi plots like the show. This is 100% high school alienation as explored through the very on-the-nose metaphor of actual teen aliens.
> 
> \- This is actually the second fic I've titled after the Robyn song "Human Being". But I had to! It felt very appropriate!
> 
> \- If you enjoyed this, and/or would like to read more, please do leave a comment! I thrive on them! :)


End file.
